Vowing to make up for lost time and lost data, officials at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, have announced a new schedule for starting up the laboratory’s Large Hadron Collider in September and keeping it running for a full year.

The new plan, they said, will ensure there will be physics results to report by the end of 2010. But what those results will be is up to nature.

The scheduling decision was good news to physicists who were worried delays in recovering from an accident that shut down the collider in the fall would squeeze out the chances to get any data this year. CERN usually shuts down its particle accelerators in the winter to save on exorbitant European electrical costs, but the laboratory’s managers have decided physics research should take precedence for now. “The decision to run through the winter has taken us off the hook in a way,” said Lyn Evans, director of the collider project.

The collider, the world’s largest, is designed to accelerate the subatomic particles known as protons around a 17-mile underground track to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then crash them together in search of new forms of matter and new laws of nature.

In September, only a week or so after protons had first circulated to great fanfare through the collider (and before they had begun colliding), an electrical link between two of the machine’s superconducting magnets vaporized, wreaking underground havoc.

For its first year, the collider will operate at 5 trillion electron volts, rather than the design standard of 7 trillion electron volts, because that is the highest level for which the magnets have been tested. That is still five times the energy of the second-largest accelerator in the world, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.

Much time and energy will be devoted to tuning up the machine and the giant five-story detectors, said Dave Charlton of the University of Birmingham, who works on the Atlas detector at CERN. “But the new plan to run for up to a year with very few stops gives us a great chance to find new physics sooner,” he said.

Dark matter, the mysterious substance astronomers say constitutes 25 percent of the universe, is high on the agenda for the first year.

A widely popular theory known as supersymmetry posits the existence of a whole new category of matter, known as superparticles. Clouds of them could be the mysterious gravitational glue that holds galaxies together.

Indeed, recent observations from satellites and balloons of anomalous cosmic ray signals have gotten experimentalists and theorists excited that a breakthrough on dark matter might be at hand.

The hitch is that nobody knows for sure the mass of these superparticles. And the particles themselves would not be directly detectable in the collider. So the experimenters have to look for their signature as “missing energy” when they add up the debris from proton collisions.

Efforts to detect that signature have been going on for several years at the Tevatron, so far to no avail. But with more energetic collisions, experimentalists say the new collider will be able to produce and confirm dark matter particles easily up to masses of several hundreds of billion electron volts. By comparison, the mass of a proton is about 1 billion electron volts.

If the superparticles are there, said Joe Lykken, a Fermilab theorist who is a member of the team that runs a detector called CMS, for Compact Muon Solenoid, at CERN, physicists may be able to characterize them “almost at the moment of discovery. With luck, this could indeed happen by the end of 2010.”

The signature quest of the Hadron collider, a particle known as the Higgs boson that in theory imbues other particles with mass, will probably take longer, because it is harder to make. Here too, the Tevatron has been amassing data for several years, hoping to nose out CERN for part of the glory of discovery.

“The indications are that the race is going to be quite close, and very exciting,” Charlton said.

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